see you right back here tomorrow. ♪ lew: good evening, everybody. u.s. foreign policy in the middle east in question at this hour. violence spiring outf contro in syria after 20 months of civil unrest and the deas of at least 40,000 murdered civilians at the hands of their own government. united states and nato agreeing to deploy patriot weapons and to thwart an aso-called by assad. the missile systems to be positioned near the syria. his staff denies that and estimates if they were deploy troops, it requires 75,000 of the troops in a full ground invasionn order seize the chemical weapon stockpile. fox news confirming they were not ordered to draft the consideration of such a mission. secretary of state clinton is nonetheless talking very tough calling for assad to step down as the obama administration has done for the past 15 months, b refusing, still, to detail which consequences those would be. >> we will explore with like-minded countries what more we can do to bring the conflict to an end, but that will require the assad regime making the decision t